Oscar-Nominated Playwright Mike Leigh's Ecstasy

From the writer of "Naked," "Secrets and Lies," and "Topsy Turvy," and for the first time in Los Angeles in almost 10 years, Underground Productions presents Mike Leigh's devastating and invasive portrait of a society on a precipice. In Northern London, 1979, four working class friends try desperately to escape the terror of the dead-end lives they have found themselves in. Ecstasy confronts the emptiness of a generation, and there are no easy answers.

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Description

“If you can’t have a laugh and a drink on a Saturday night, when can you?” announces a character in “Ecstasy,” Mike Leigh’s devastating portrait of four working-class English friends carousing in a shabby furnished room in northwest London. Over the course of the party, which consumes the play’s second act, nothing much happens except that the characters drink a lot of beer, smoke a lot of cigarettes, become sloppily sentimental and sing songs. But through a wealth of casually dispensed personal detail and naturalistic ensemble acting of astonishing intensity and nuance, “Ecstasy” cheerily bares the soul of a society on a precipice.